Twitter was down – but the service has now almost fully recovered

It wasn't just you – Twitter went down today, but the social network now looks likely it has mostly recovered for users across the world. 

The issue began around 5am PT / 8am ET / 1pm BST on Thursday July 14 2022, with a huge spike in reports on services like DownDetector. However, around an hour later the service appeared to have almost fully recovered.

We're still waiting for Twitter to confirm the issue and reveal any potential reason for it, but for now here's how it all went down.

As we mentioned above, issues with Twitter began in the early hours of the morning in the US and just as many in the UK were lunchtime scroll.

The outage tracker site DownDetector showed a massive spike in complaints, with users hitting up other social media sites to report problems.

If you've just logged onto Twitter, you'll have likely seen this message up. The social network appears to be experiencing a big outage, with reports on Downdetector continuing to show a big spike.

We're contacting Twitter to get official comment, but for now you'll have to head to TikTok and Reddit to snack of memes and hot-takes.

The big Twitter outage appears to be a pretty global problem, with spikes in reports of issues in most countries. In the US, there were 54,000 reports of problems on Downdetector in the last few minutes – a lot more than the last time this happened in March.

It's almost as big in the UK, though, with 27,000 reports there, reflecting the lunchtime frustration of those (including us) who just wanted to snack on the installment of the UK's latest political psychodrama. 

When there's a big internet outage like this, the first place we usually turn to is... Twitter. The social network hasn't responded to our requests for comment, but the issues seem to be easing in the UK at least.

Anecdotally, some members of the TechRadar team has found the site working again on desktop and mobile. But over in the US, there are still major issues – resulting in fun error messages like this. 

As Reddit has discussed, the biggest fear when you see massive Twitter error messages is that your account has been hacked or deleted. But fear not, the social network is simply experiencing its longest global outage for a while.

Naturally, there's a lot of chat that the outage is related to the seemingly-troubled Elon Musk takeover. While Twitter is down, we're very much open to conspiracy theories from elsewhere... 

We've just guffawed at a fine joke from @Dadsaysjoke, so that can only mean one thing – Twitter is seemingly back in action.

The Downdetector reports have dropped to just over 1,500 in the UK and our US Editor-in-chief has made this celebratory tweet. All is well in the world again.